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Notes -
I had quite the throwback culture war experience this past weekend. While at a family gathering, my dad was cornered by an in-law and quizzed about my “agnosticism”.
He was asked if he had led me to this lack of faith, and was then informed that it’s the patriarch’s responsibility to “get his family into heaven” – a neat little double-duty insult of both himself and me.
I tend to be a very laid-back guy in meatspace, but found myself livid. I’ve been in this family for close to a decade, and the sheer cowardice and arrogance of this exchange was breathtaking. To circle around to one of my direct family members instead of having the cajones to challenge me directly was ridiculous (and in hindsight, what I should have really expected from these people).
We’ve been existing in what I thought was a reasonable detente. As a victorious participant in the Atheism culture war, I’ve been kinda-sorta prepared to have these skirmishes with my wife’s catholic family for a long time. The unspoken agreement was that I go to church for holidays, let you splash water on my children, and don’t bring up anyone’s hypocrisy/the church’s corruption, rampant pedophilia/the inherent idiocy in believing in god.
In exchange, I get to stay balls deep in my excellent wife and should be left alone.
I’ll be the first to admit the excesses of Atheism’s victory laps and see how “live and let live” can slide down the slope into a children’s drag show. But this indirect exchange reminded me that when the culture war pendulum swings back, I should be prepared for the petty tyrants and fools on the religious right to reassert themselves. We’re already starting to see the tendrils of this, even if some of their forces have been replaced with rainbow-skinsuit churches across the US.
For Christian motteziens - No disrespect intended. I'm aware of the hypocrisy of my arrogance in this post, and it's intended to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek
I agree that it was sneaky to get on to your father about this, and that if they have a problem they should go directly to you.
But this neat little snippet:
Too many people online reach for this as an all-purpose defence and smug way of going "nothing like this on our side, it's all on the religious nutjob right side!"
Yeah. We in the Church have been forced to acknowledge this and deal with it. Hysterically going "it's the priests who are raping kids!!!" when credible allegations of grooming and bad behaviour are shown on the nice progressive side isn't going to save you. If you are so much better than we are, what are you doing about the problem in your community? And if it's "doesn't concern me, I don't do it, I don't know anyone who does" then you're no better (or worse) than the average Catholic who never knew anyone engaging in the same thing.
The church has made genuine progress in addressing child sexual abuse, but it remains a problem and lots of that progress is being undone because the faction in control of the Vatican right now has too few qualified personnel to let them face even minor consequences for negligence or complicity. In any case the biggest child sex abuse crisis, proportionately, was the public school system and priests had a more or less statistically average rate of committing that particular crime.
The delta between abuse within the Catholic Church and in public schools is well documented, and supports the (in my opinion obvious[1]) conclusion that your children are less likely to be abused in a Catholic school than in a secular one.
[1]: It seems like the obvious answer that a Catholic organization, which treats the family, and especially children, as the most important part of society and worthy of the most protection, would be a safe place for children. The (false) idea that Catholic priests are somehow more likely than anybody else to abuse children (in reality they are less likely) only had staying power as a meme because of how counterintuitive it seemed. "Man bites dog" and all that.
According your link, Catholic priests are less likely than school teachers to abuse children ... and both are orders of magnitude more likely than anybody else. Compare its stated 10K abuse allegations from 100K priests (4,392/4%) to its remaining 310K abuse allegations from 260M non-priest adults in the US and the former is about a factor of 100 higher ... but then consider that, to have the stated 5% abuser rate, the 4M teachers in the US must have 200K abusers among them, and at even 2 incidents per abuser teacher (still less than the stated rate among abuser priests) that wouldn't leave any allegations left for non-priest non-teachers.
Maybe this makes sense, at least after accounting for rounding errors, in a Willie Sutton "Why do you rob banks?" "Because that's where the money is." sense? But I have to wonder if these numbers are just inconsistent because some of them are incorrect, or at best inconsistently defined.
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